1994 Cheney Being Right = 2002/2003 Cheney Lied

Last week, I (and a zillion other blogs) posted a 1994 video of Dick Cheney presciently explaining why invading Iraq would be a disaster. Only three years later-- ie. well before 9/11-- his ties to neocon thinktanks showed he was changing his mind. Why?

Here is what a Cheney spokesperson said last week about this, before going for the 'no comment' close: "He was not Vice President at the time, it was after he was Secretary of Defense." Well, no shit Sherlock, but that doesn't address the issue.

Jon Stewart got it right (as usual, and how sad again that it has to be him) when he interviewed Dick Cheney's biographer last week. The significance of the video was it that showed that the Vice President who sold the war knew what all the risks and consequences were likely to be... except none of that was mentioned when they were selling the war in 2002 and 2003.

No one in the administration even hinted at the issues Cheney had acknowledged 8 years earlier. And, as Stewart also noted, they didn't even bother planning for them either.

It was all talk of cake walks, being greeted as liberators, a war that would pay for itself, and be over in in six weeks (tops!). And those who tried to warn at this time of what was going to happen (folks like Al Gore, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Lincoln Chafee, etc) were labeled as unpatriotic fools and traitors and terror-sympathizers. And even now, the war-defender stance is that no one could've known how this would turn out and hindsight is 20/20. But for many people who were (and still are) dismissed, foresight was 20/20.

The video goes to the heart of the deceit and lies with which they sold this war. It is no wonder that the Cheney people have no comment. If I'd lied my country into a disastrous war, I wouldn't want to discuss it either.